By Bernadette Brennan

The tumultuous, ever-restless life and times of Randolph Stow have been meticulously recorded in Suzanne Falkiner's biography of the brilliant Australian writer.

SUZANNE FALKINER

UWA PRESS, $50

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Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, by Suzanne Falkiner.

In 1976 Randolph Stow was asked if he thought learning about an artist's life and personality contributed to a deeper understanding of the artist's creative work. His reply, given his reputation for being an intensely private man, was surprising. "Yes," he said, "one does need to know a great deal – well, a certain amount – about an author's life, and not only what he chooses to have known."

Insisting that his answer was in relation to Joseph Conrad, a writer whom he greatly admired, he continued: "For instance, it wasn't known until quite recently that he had tried to commit suicide as a young man. I must say that it is obviously something that one needs to know."

With the publication of Suzanne Falkiner's Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, readers have the opportunity to learn a great deal about one of the greatest Australian writers of the 20th century. Coming in at just under 900 pages, including more than 100 pages of endnotes, Falkiner's biography is a massive scholarly work. After years of exhaustive archival research, international travel and extensive interviews, Falkiner crafts a credible and moving portrait of a brilliant, sensitive, complex man. This biography is a significant contribution to Australian literary studies.

Stow's first novel, A Haunted Land (1956), was published when he was only 19 years old. By the age of 21 he was co-editor of The Winthrop Review and had added The Bystander (1957) and Act One: Poems (1957) to his publications. He went on to publish another seven novels – including his best known, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1966) – four volumes of poetry and a raft of journal articles and book reviews.

Falkiner traces meticulously his path from, as he himself defined it, "a Western Australian regional writer" to "an Anglo-Saxon writer"; a boy from Geraldton to an elderly man at home in Suffolk. It was a tumultuous, ever-restless journey, filled with pain and self-destruction, but also with friendship, love and regeneration.

Stow, a talented linguist, was interested deeply in anthropology. In 1957, while working for a few months as a storeman at the Forest River Mission in the Kimberley, he learnt the language of the Oombulgurri​ people. His experiences there informed his Miles Franklin-winning novel, To the Islands (1958).

After a brief sojourn tutoring in the Department of English at the University of Adelaide, he moved to Sydney and enrolled in an anthropology degree. He described his ideal life then as being "able to wander around Western Australia and the Territory, and maybe New Guinea, and on intervals go back to Geraldton and write poems, novels, and learned articles". Yet shortly afterwards he would make his first suicide attempt.

One of the most fascinating – and tragic – periods of Stow's life was the year he spent, in 1959, as a cadet patrol officer in the Trobriand Islands. Again he quickly picked up the language, Bika-Kiriwina, perhaps with disastrous effect. Did he mishear the rumours supposedly being spread about him taking young boys to bed? How much did his despair and shame contribute to him slashing his arms and throat with a razor blade?

Fortunately, for the reader, Stow wrote regularly to his mother and, except for some of the more disturbing letters sent from Papua New Guinea, she kept all his correspondence. Falkiner quotes liberally from his letters – to his mother and others – in these chapters and throughout the book. She also cites his suicide note and includes excerpts from his private journal kept during the difficult months in the islands. This direct access to Stow's voice is invaluable for giving a sense of the young man and his emotional state. Years later he drew on this time for his powerful novel Visitants (1981).

In Falkiner's recent essay in the Sydney Review of Books, she expands on her time researching in the Trobriand Islands. Troublingly, she discovered that the portion of Stow's Department of Territories personnel file that dealt with his mental and physical breakdown had gone missing from the Australian Government Archives.

For most of his life Stow struggled with gastric troubles. As an adult he smoked heavily and drank to excess. Like his father he had a predisposition to depression, or as he called it, that "vile melancholy".

Despite his fragile health, he led an extraordinarily peripatetic life, rarely settling anywhere longer than a year. He traversed the globe studying and teaching. He turned down many offers of lectureships, insisting they would put an end to his writing. Yet he completed a six-week lecture tour of Canada in the mid-'60s, and in 1972 delivered a lecture on the poetry of Slessor, Wright and Douglas Stewart at the University of London. He left Australia for good in 1974, but he remained well-versed in Australian literature.

Falkiner arranges the biography in strict chronological order, affording each relocation its own chapter, all the while quietly layering her composite picture of this fascinating man.

Stow developed a reputation for solitude that reached almost legendary proportions. Stories abounded of admiring writers and students being turned away from his door with frosty, silent stares. Falkiner complicates that narrative. Yes, she admits, in his later years Stow "continued to seesaw between sociability and reclusiveness", but over the course of the biography we get a sense of Stow's many close friendships and his companionable openness to all sorts of people.

His friendships with the Nolans (particularly Cynthia), Patrick White (whose letters bring a joyous lift to this narrative), Bill Grono, Tom Shapcott, John Beston, Bruce Bennett, Tony Hassall, Peter Skrzynecki, Antigone Kefala, Nicolas Jose, David Foster, John Kinsella – the list goes on and on – were rich and sustaining. He was well liked in Harwich, where he even worked for a time as the local barman.

Stow was a writer of deep silences. He defined a number of love poems published in ACounterfeit Silence (1969) as being "mostly private letters", "each one addressed to a particular person, and talking about my relationship with that person". Falkiner quotes a number of sources who speak about Stow's homosexuality, but she also respects that Stow was anxiously private about his sexuality.

In her author's note she demonstrates her understanding about the fraught ethical questions of biography, particularly a biography of Stow. Fittingly, she leaves Stow's "great loves" largely unnamed, concluding instead that "Mick loved a number of people – men and women – deeply and in different ways".

Falkiner obviously had a wealth of material to work with and she has shaped it well into this weighty book. There is a surfeit of detail, however, that results in a certain flatness of much of the early prose. With more rigorous editing she may have had further leeway to explore in greater depth Stow's spirituality and its influence on his writing.

Being a conventional biography, the book offers no critical analysis of Stow's oeuvre. In one sense this absence is a shame, but in another it means that while we now have a much clearer idea of the man known as Mick Stow, or "Michael", or "The Prof", the poet and novelist Randolph Stow remains as richly ambiguous, interesting and ripe for further study as ever.